Morphology of Precipitation Clouds and Cloud Systems 
Chairman: JOANNE MaALkus 
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts 
IntrRopucToRY REMARKS 
The first session of this Conference on Physics 
of Precipitation is intended to set the stage or 
develop the context for the subject matter and 
papers which are to come. In the atmosphere, 
there are many different scales of phenomena as- 
sociated with precipitation, from the macroscale 
over the mesoscale down to single bubbles or ed- 
dies within an individual cloud. This is certainly 
one reason why in all meteorological studie 
I think most of us will agree that cloud physics is 
a meteorological study—we must consider the 
context of the other scales of motion in which this 
one is operating, and in particular we generally 
s—and 
bl 
find that we must look up the scale to larger scale 
phenomena. Therefore, it is extremely appropri- 
ate that the context of the first session include a 
discussion on the synoptic and larger scale flow 
patterns and their relation to the precipitation 
process. Our first speaker on this session is par- 
ticularly well suited to begin this discussion start- 
ing with a very large scale motion before we grad- 
dually work down. I think it is a landmark in 
cloud physics certainly, and perhaps also even in 
synoptic meteorology that one of the world’s 
leading synoptic meteorologists present a paper 
at a session such as this. | take pleasure in intro- 
dueing Mr. Namias. 
